


Singing Each To Each

by Cluegirl



Series: A Thing Of Rags and Patches [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Insanity, Lovecraftian suspense, PTSD, Self Loathing, Survivor co-dependency, cult murder mystery, fat phobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 09:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16323287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: This is a story about the fragility of evidence, unwelcome understanding, skeleton keys, regrets, repression, and the painful price of survival.





	Singing Each To Each

The wind howls ragged and raw and throbbing across the chimney holes that pepper this crumbling basalt. If I lean my left ear into the blast, close my eyes and hold my breath listening, I might winnow out the strange words, the rhythmic, mad tune behind the slash and boom of the tide below. And if I kneel, my right ear to the chimney hole just there where firelight claws the mist, I might hear a girl screaming through a wad of fabric tied tight between her jaws.

I want to scream. 

I want to bellow into the building storm and the cancer it’s concealing under its lacy skirts of tide and sodden rock. I want to howl and stamp and wave my flashlight in the air – “Here! They’re here! Hurry up, or it’ll be too-“

_Late._

I don’t scream. 

Because I don’t want to wake my roommate. Again. I don’t want to weather the sidelong looks from couple 34B, whose sleeping heads aren't quite ten feet above me. Why don’t they put soundproofing between apartment floors? Why are people so damned careless?

Lightning offshore, percussive and searing as it stitches sea to sky. I count the miles in whispered seconds until the snarl rolls through, tympanic counterpoint to the scrabbling tide's retreat. It shouldn't sound like a bell, but it always does.

_Time to go now._

I don’t want to go. There’s no point. He’s gone, she’s safe, the Christmas killings are over. No dream can change that. No dream can unmake that lucky shot.

_Time to go. Time to go._

The stairs are clear this time, smooth and level down the cliff face, as if scooped hot out of butter. I use both hands, not trusting the storm despite three hundred sixty four nights when I've not been plucked off these stairs and smashed on the dream-rocks below. I cling like a spider all the way down to the stinking, startled tidepools, and only let go when I’ve both feet on the level path. It runs like a pier from the lea of the guardian stone straight into the dripping, fire lit cave the full moon, unseen behind the storm, has chivvied out of the winter sea.

_Hurry now. Hurry. You can’t be late, or else…_

My dreaming mind doesn’t shut up just for the telling of it. I’ve had a year to learn that. I’d chew my arm off and leave it behind in this dream if I thought I’d never have to go through this weed clung, dripping tunnel again, holding my breath while the slime glides beneath my boots. 

_Should be barefoot, really. Shoes seem disrespectful in this…_

Fuck, it’s just a cave. Just a cave the sea keeps secret, and all it leads to is a natural rock formation. Nothing hatched beneath the spires of Sentinel Cove, patient and blind and hungry. Nothing chewed the basalt into crazy switchback patterns until its teeth finally found air and water and blood – _Shut UP!_

Just a sea cave. Interesting geological formation. It’s only the bizarrely low tides that show the entrance, and of course the moon and planets affect all that. Astrological coincidence and that’s all. Full moon on the winter Solstice five years running is long odds, but hardly impossible. No reason an eclipse this year... the sixth year, would be strange either. Coincidence. Natural, rational explanations for all of it. 

Except for the dead girls. But psychos find the stupidest things to justify what they do. Chris was no different… just… smarter. That’s all.

_You ever hear of a skeleton key, Michaela?_

Shut up…

^*^

“You’re not going in today, are you?” Stephanie asks, precisely rumpled in her panties and faded concert T. Her hair’s a mess, and her eyes are hollow pits of bone. I guess she didn’t sleep either.

I shake my head clear and fix my eyes back on the coffeepot. “Yeah.”

“You look like hell, girl,” she says, and slips past me for to fetch down her mug. I don’t flinch. Go me. “Look, nobody would say anything if you just took a personal day, would they?” she asks, all sympathy and sensible concern.

The coffee pot's beep buys me time to think. Would they say anything? Not to my face, but their looks when they thought I couldn’t see, their whispers once I’d left the room, their filthy speculations would be bad enough. Do they think I loved him, pathetic and hopeless in the worship of a frump for the football star? Would pathetic grief better excuse my hiding away on the anniversary of his disappearance than cold-bellied horror? Could I possibly be lucky enough that they’d stop guessing there?

I shake my head, and reach down the Splenda. I hate it, chemical tang like metal slag and dreadful in mortal combat at the back of my throat, but I haven’t got the luxury of sugar like Steph does. Damned cheerleader metabolism. “I have to go in," I tell her. "The memorial vigil’s next week.” Christmas week, not because that’s when his body turned up -- unlike his victims, Chris' body never did come to land, -- but because we all clearly don’t have enough to make us feel like crap at this time of year. 

But we're cops, and cops do this kind of thing. So the department will pay us half time to go waste an hour in St. Mary's of the Sea, buy a bunch of candles, and wait for some sign that Detective Chris Dennis is resting in peace instead of rotting in Hell. And I’ll go with them, count heartbeats and try not to remember.

Steph’s looking at me, all eyebrow. About to ask ‘so what’, just as if she’s not going to have to be there too. Miss Nayatt, fiancée of the fallen, best beloved of our lost comrade and all that crap, for all she's lived here with me since the night I saved her from him. 

Will she lean on me, I wonder? Will she press close to my side so I can smell the sea on her breath, and feel her bones shivering inside the smooth, cold sleeve of her skin? Or will she pull out that drama club charm, channel the sorrowful virgin, and seduce the whole department with her gentle woe? She’s done both over the past year. I can't tell which act I hate more. 

She cocks her head, and I think that I hear “So what?” in her New England twang, I’ll have to put the coffee cup in there sideways. “So we’ve all got to do psych evals now,” I say quickly, “Vicarious trauma, delayed reaction. Some bullshit like that.”

“Psych evals. Even for the evidence clerks?” she asks, and her eyes twinkle. There’s a dimple in her right cheek, and I have to make myself look away so I won’t imagine a tiny eel chewing its way through that peach-soft flesh and swimming away in blue tide. Her fingers brush mine, and this time I do flinch. “So what are you gonna tell them, Mickey?”

I shrug, and turn the cup in my hands. “The truth.” And for a second, my heart trips over itself, though I can’t quite tell whether it’s from joy, or alarm.

She’s staring at me when I glance up, eyes round and blue, face pale as chalk, pale as sand, pale as bone. She's rubbing at her wrist, where the ropes were too slick, too thick to cut without sawing. _You never left the cave,_ I want to say. _You’re still there, tied to that stone, waiting for the Solstice tide to let you out…_

But I haven’t the nerve.

Then she laughs, and the sound is high and nervous. “Well you see, Doctor,” she manages after a moment, “After I killed the bad guy that everyone thought was a good guy, and rescued the princess, we both took off and lived happily ever after in my castle,” she waves a hand at the cheap, grimy kitchenette; laminate so weary that no amount of scrubbing can bring it near clean, appliances functioning more out of senile habit than competence. “Except for the part where we both get nightmares, you can barely go outside, I can’t look a guy straight in the eye, and nobody knows that the boogieman isn’t still out there killing girls every winter. Jesus, Mickey, no wonder nobody at the department gets your jokes!”

 _Chris got my jokes._ I don’t have the nerve to say that either.

“I’ll tell them the truth,” I say into the cup. “That I can’t remember what happened.” 

The look she gives me stinks of pity. That’s it. Time to leave. I gulp the coffee so fast I don’t taste the Splenda through the burn. “Yeah, so. You working tonight?” So I know whether I’ll have to sneak past her when I get home, and hide in my room from the smell of the sea, and her drowned, flattened a’s.

“Yeah. A double. I figured I could use the distraction. Come by for dinner?” At my hesitation, she strokes her fingers down my uniform shirt, leaving no wet streaks behind. “Come on, Mickey. I need someone to keep that creep Hayden off my ass. He never hangs around for long when you’re in…”

And I nod. Damn it. I do whatever she wants me to do, and I’m pathetic, and on good days I can almost pretend we don’t both know it. Maybe she thinks I’m in love with her, frump for cheerleader in some alt-lifestyle after school special. Maybe. 

Either way, I’ll go to the Shoreline café, cockblock the department’s token prick. I'll let her serve me dinner and choke it down while I pretend I can’t see her bones peeking out of her flesh, and smell death and sea-wrack hiding behind her perfume.

^*^

Actually, I lied.

It’s not a department wide Psych eval, just a cozy little sit down, heart to heart, date over coffee between me and Internal Affairs. Not something I can ditch, really, even if I didn't so desperately need to stay busy. With the solstice breathing down my neck, if I don’t keep to some kind of pattern I’ll come apart before then.

I have to pretend everything's fine. Pretend until it's true. I'm good at that.

So I’m punctual and I'm polite, and I spend my first hour at work facing an unsmiling stranger in interview room #3. Cameras running just to make it official, because it kind of is. Funny how little I care about maybe losing my job now that I may be losing my mind.

I feel sorry for the IA guy, actually. He’s the automatic villain, henchman of The Man, the flinty right hand of Big Brother panting down the neck of every cop here. He hasn’t got a hope of welcome no matter which department he walks into, and nothing can change that. He was probably a great guy when he took the job, before suspicion and disgust scraped all trace of kindness out of his face. Might still be a great guy on the weekends; foster stray puppies, volunteer with the homeless, man suicide hotlines... but I’m guessing that terrifyingly neutral face he’s wearing has been in place so long it’s gone permanent.

I wonder what his wife thinks of it.

“Officer Delaney,” he says to the file in his hands. It’s a thick one, so it can't be mine. Hayden's then. “Please tell me what happened on Monday.”

I don’t start the story with waking up screaming as usual, but it’s a near thing. It’s harder to keep the sarcasm in check when I’m tired. And I’m tired all the time these days…which is why we’re here, really. I take a drink of my coffee and shrug. “Short form? We traded insults, and I won.”

Finally he looks at me. “Explain “won” please.”

“Rules of verbal sparring; the first one to swing has lost the argument.” Damn, I can’t say that without smiling. I should be trying harder. This is important. “Look, Hayden comes down to the Evidence locker anytime he’s had a bad day, and he takes it out on me. It’s just his way of… I don’t know, maybe keeping his cool out on the street. He busts my chops a little,” The IA guy eyebrows, and I hasten to add, “Figuratively that is. Then he doesn’t feel like him and his mustache have as much to prove out there on the street, right? Sure, he’s been worse since his partner disappeared last year, but it’s usually just hot air. So I pay it no mind.”

The IA guy sets his pen down and laces his fingers together. He still hasn’t tasted his coffee. When did I start to notice things like that? “Maybe you should give me the long form,” he says.

“We only have an hour.”

He accedes the point with a nod. “I’ve gathered that Detective Hayden is a candidate for anger management training, so you can consider that point made. But I still need the details on Monday's altercation. Why don’t you start with the notebook?”

I don’t flinch, and this is mainly because I don’t breathe until my heart manages to find its pace again. I knew this had to be coming. “The notebook’s not relevant,” I try.

“Officer Delaney, we have a Detective with a broken wrist, possibly facing a disciplinary hearing, and several witness reports to corroborate here. All statements mention that notebook. That makes it relevant.”

“No, see it was just Hayden's excuse du jour, is all.” He isn’t buying. Shit.

“Tell me about it anyway.”

“Ok, look. I do my job and I do it well, but there’s a lot of downtime that goes with sitting around in the Hole waiting for someone to check a box in or out. I get bored.” It suddenly occurs to me that I _am_ telling him the truth, just as I’d threatened. I have to squelch the urge to giggle. 

“And so you write to fill the time?” 

“Case studies.” 

He gives me a look. “Current cases?”

And I have to nod. “Sometimes. If they’re interesting. I mean, I see all the evidence lists anyway, and you know how cops gossip when you feed them. I just listen, and write down what I think is… interesting.”

“And you found one of Detective Hayden’s cases interesting? The Christmas Killer?” He’s frowning now, and I shake my head to stop where he’s about to take this. 

“I don’t meddle. I don’t talk to witnesses, I don’t break chain of evidence, or compromise case files.” And that’s true too. Because Chris was just helpful enough, just careless enough with his paperwork, and so I never had to. The IA guy, I’m thinking, wouldn’t see it like that though. “I just…” I shrug, “watch, listen, and put together what I hear in my own way.”

“All right. Then what?” He waits a few beats. “What do you do with your conclusions, Officer Delaney?” 

_Get people killed; nothing: save a girl's life; nothing; solve the case; nothing; raise a sleeping monster; nothing; shoot my only friend in the head -_

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” That eyebrow goes up, and that’s a good sign, isn’t it? He isn’t bothering to use the robot face on me. 

I try a smile, but it feels too tight. “Do I look like badge and gun material to you? Some kind of supersize Jane Tracey with bad glasses? This isn’t my mild mannered alter ego, sir, this is really me; bad knees, diabetes and all.” He looks like he can’t decide whether to apologize or not, and I have to laugh. Pity, I’m used to, but I’d rather have scorn; it chafes less. 

“The point is, I’m smart enough to take an interest in these cases, but I’m also smart enough to keep my fat ass out of them in every official capacity.” I finish off my coffee in a gulp, the sweetener less awful now it’s gone cold. “I’m no wannabe gumshoe. The only reason I bother qualifying at the firing range is because it’s departmental policy, and I don’t need to give Hayden even more reasons to hassle me.”

“I did notice you aren’t wearing a sidearm.”

I don’t shudder, and though my right hand aches with memory, I manage not to clench it under the table. “I don’t own one,” I say, doing my best not to think of the narrow box taped to the bottom shelf of rack 40 down in the Hole. That’s Chris’s piece, not mine. I’m just hiding it, that’s all. In case.

It’s tempting to babble into the waiting silence that follows, and I figure that’s exactly what it’s there for, so I don’t. After awhile, the AI guy sighs and checks his files again. “All right then; Detective Hayden learned of your interest in his case, he came down to the Evidence locker to confront you, and then what?”

I make myself shrug. “He did.” Again, that waiting silence. This time, I crack first. “He tore my notebook in half, and told me to keep out of his business and let him do his job.”

“In those words?” he asks, already knowing better.

“He said, ‘Do I come down here when you’re trying to work and knock the donut out of your mouth?’” He checks his file, and that not-smile peeks out, so I go on and admit it. Sexual harassment is the least of Hayden's worries, really. “Only he didn’t say donut.”

“No,” he muses, not looking at me, “He didn’t. And your reply?”

I don’t see why this is necessary, but there’s no point being shy at this stage of the game. “I told him if he got out of the closet and did something about his dick obsession, he'd have time to do his job properly.” I toss the Styrofoam cup into the trash by way of a hint, in case he needs it. “That’s when he broke his hand.”

“Detective Hayden assaulted you?”

_Yes._

“No. He punched the wall. It’s cinderblock down there.”

“Witnesses seem to disagree with you,” he challenges, “I have three statements that he swung on _you_ , not the wall.”

I wish I hadn’t pitched the cup. I wish I hadn’t broken Hayden’s hand. I wish I hadn't come to work. I wish I’d broken his skull instead. “Witnesses were at the other end of the hall, sir, and are therefore unreliable. Have you seen the lighting down in the Hole? Caves are brighter.”

Again, the look. Again, the silence. He sets his pen down and laces his fingers again. I'm learning his signature moves. “Officer Delaney, does Detective Hayden frighten you?”

And if this question had been laid before me a year ago, I would have laughed. Because a year ago, I didn’t _know_ what frightened me. I hadn’t seen it yet. Hadn’t looked into its blue eyes and heard it explaining itself in clear, reasonable tones. Hadn’t almost found myself believing it was right. Now, the question just makes my stomach cramp. I don’t bother to hide the shudder as I answer once more with the truth.

“No, sir. No, he doesn’t.”

^*^

With Hayden in the penalty box, I expect the department to be buzzing once the AI guy's finally let me go, and buzzing it is. But instead of the Munchkin Town glee club, the Blue Hive is alive and on point – a frenzied sense of everyone needing full hands, somewhere to go at top speed, some task that can stand up to the combination of adrenaline and irrelevance. A thick musk of ferocity, awe, and a half-guilty joy eddies through the whispering efficiency.

I don't need to see the dispatch report to guess what it means. After three years and fourteen bodies washed up on Fortress Point's ragged headland, my guts now divine the portents in icy knots and the ghost of a breakfast I didn't eat. Only one thing could have half the shift at full speed while the other half is conspicuously absent; the thing they've all been waiting for, because they didn't know it wasn't going to happen. 

I close my eyes and try to remember the tidal charts from my notebook. Was the cave exposed early? Did something shift in the offshore deeps to draw the waters back, some sub-marine slouch or surge we'd never have felt on land? Something vast and unseen rising toward the air- 

_Shut UP!_

"Still got that notebook, Agent Harriet?" someone calls as they jostle past me. "Looks like the game's afoot again." 

Cops. Who else can mix Fitzhugh with Doyle in the same line and keep a straight face? I work up a smirk and head toward the stairs. "Nah, Hayden's confiscated it so he could try and find his own ass." 

A burst of laughter, and another voice chimes in. "He'll be using it awhile then."

"At least until he looks on his head," I reply, and their laughter follows me down the stairs. It means nothing. Hayden means nothing. This sudden, hollow popularity means nothing. There's another body, and though it's too early by a week for the currents to have carried it out, it must have turned up where the others did, and in similar condition to justify all this. That _can't_ mean nothing. It just can't.

For a crazy moment, I wonder if Hayden didn't kill this one, just to keep the case hot. Some diversion to brush aside Monday's stupidity. But no. He's neither that smart, nor that crazy. Not like Chris was.

I turn my cel phone on and the voicemail jangles at once. Steph's called five times in an hour. Someone must have had his radio on in the café when the dispatch call went out. Either that, or the newsies got wind of it, and I can expect to see the cute brunette from Channel 3 chewing over the gristle on the breakroom TV.

I don't call her back. I’ve got nothing to tell her, have I? I do ring the bakery down the block and order two dozen mixed though. The delivery boy will have to carry the boxes through the department on his way down to the Hole, and that'll bring the news to me faster than any subtle snooping could do. And I’ll be the one to document the evidence, which with one little code I was never supposed to have, will give me ranking access to the case file as it develops. 

I don't have a Detective playing fairy godmother now, it's true. But I also don't have a psycho grooming me for his sidekick; teaching me what to do, when, and worst of all, why. Theoretically this ought to be easier now. Safer, at least. Saner doesn't bear thinking.

I wonder if I can stonewall Steph long enough for the coroner’s report to come online. No, she’s used to getting her way. She won’t let me hide too long, and so I’ve got to make best use of the time I have. Sort this out. Have my hypothesis in place before I have to face the froth of panic in her water-green eyes, and somehow convince her that things will be okay.

Patience. Observation. That's how I figured it out last time, and whatever's going on now, I'll sort it out just like last time, but better. Whatever’s happened, whoever’s done it, this time I'll know before I find myself facing my best friend over the sights of his gun, with no backup, nobody to stop his knife hand. Nobody but me. This time I won’t need to go down to the water to know what’s hatching out of it. 

Maybe now would be a good time to get the gun out of its hiding place. I can stash it in my bag, keep it closer to hand, for awhile. A week, maybe. Two. Just in case.

^*^

“It’s the same guy,” the admitting clerk insists. “Two victims found nude at the same dumpsite on the same schedule. It’s our guy.”

Carew from Vice begs to differ. “It’s not the same. Tourists’ kids gone missing from a family boating trip, not skid row washouts.” And he’s right. Chris was never that careless. 

His partner backs him up. “Sister and brother this time too. Even when we found more than one at a time, there’s never been a male before." 

_There was a male last year._ I don’t say it. Because that wasn’t a proper sacrifice, was it? It was just a deluded psycho, shot down in a seaside grotto and left for the tide. That wouldn’t have turned the key, wouldn’t have jammed the door.

_Wouldn’t it? Really?_

It’s not him. It’s just not. The currents take anything in the bay to the headland anyhow. And it’s too early. None of the previous victims died before the Solstice, or were found before Christmas. It can’t be him.

But Ellis from the trace lab thinks differently. “It’s him. The eyes. No way that was fish or crabs, not with the bodies so very fresh. It has to be him.”

Welkin is officer of the watch, and he’s having none of it. “It’s not him. The press knew about the eyes. People in China knew about the damned eyes. You show me those six cuts on the throats, and that weird shit with the hands, and I’ll maybe buy it. But if it’s just the eyes and lungs full of water? Pshh."

And he’s right. Chris never drowned them. It’s not the same. It’s not him. Problem is, it’s someone, and that someone could be trying to see Chris Dennis's work through. Someone is trying to turn the key, they’re just doing it wrong.

Amy comes over from the coroner’s with several phials; hairs, nail scrapings, swabs. The ME’s looking for sexual trace, and she's pretty sure he’ll find it. That would nail the coffin shut on it being the Christmas Killer. If there was rape, then it’s not anybody who'd bought into Chris's insane mythology. 

I don’t say that either. Nor do I enter into the debate over whether traces of sexual assault would even show up in a body that’d been in the sea for a week. I’m busy counting breaths to keep them absolutely level, and remembering to blink every other one.

The majority of the sidelined Blue thinks if there's any sexual component, then the perp will be someone trying to cover their own murders with the Christmas Killer’s. An abuser tidying up before his toys can tell on him; an ex or a parent planning to cash in on celebrity victimhood by proxy; someone with a personal reason to want those two gone.

But could it not have been both? If they’d known what they would be locking out, why not make use of the silence?

_Doesn’t this place make you dream, Michaela? These stones, this sea, this damned endless wind? Doesn’t it give you patterns, night after night, that make such terrible sense? I see it in your eyes; you know why this is necessary. You know why this is right._

I’ve been going in these circles all day. Every sliver of information sets me off again, every new rumor that follows the donuts down to the Hole, every note Hayden adds to the file, every murmur that slips through the ductwork between the Chief’s office and the third floor bathroom. 

I don’t know what to think. By the end of my shift, I’m not even sure it couldn’t have been Chris. Did I dream that shot? Was that shocked stare and tiny dark hole above it all in my imagination? Did I stop him, or just give him better cover? Did I shut a killer down, or did I set one free? 

I want my notebook. I want to go over my notes on the tidal shifts, astrological conjunctions, and geological surveys of Sentinel Cove. I want to review my charmingly naive ponderings on the archaeological controversies surrounding its up thrust granite spars, like a henge above the thrashing sea. Paleolithic worship site? Stunning natural formation? Handy collusion of both? I want to read that line I wrote when it all fell into place, when the pattern of stars, tides, and crazy resolved into a sudden, bone-deep _knowing._ I want the comfort of proof that, even though led to it by a smiling killer, I still sorted this out once before. 

But that hope is vain. Even if Hayden didn’t burn it, Internal Affairs would snap the notebook up at the slightest hint of it still being around. It’s part of an investigation, so it has to stay gone, for all the same reasons Chris has to stay gone – because it’s far too complicated to still be around. 

Still, there’s something leaden heavy lodged in my belly when I close out my shift and head for the door. I pass Hayden’s office, and overhear him phoning up the coast guard dive team to schedule a search in a new site. It should surprise me, perhaps, to realize I’ve the coordinates of Sentinel Cove memorized, but it doesn’t. 

It just makes me tired. It just makes me cold.

I am not surprised to see storm clouds gathering offshore when I finally make my way out to the bus stop.

^*^

_You ever hear of a skeleton key, Michaela?_

I shake the memory off like a dog shedding cold water, relieved when the thunderclap makes everyone on the bus jump too. The kid across the row keeps both hands and eyes on his phone, some stylish racket going on underneath the wires that link it to his ears. The man next to him glares as if the noise is my fault. 

I stare back, unwinding the knotted straps of my bag from my bloodless fingers. I can't feel the metal through the canvas; there’s this week’s shift schedule and a dog-eared copy of _Something Wicked This Way Comes_ between it and me. There's no whiff of gun oil, steel and malice when I shift the bag, and my murder weapon higher into my lap. He can't know I've got it. He’s just glaring because he thinks I fell asleep on the bus, like a bum with the price of her fare and nowhere warmer to be at ten o clock a week before Christmas.

The way he holds my eye for a second before sniffing away tells me that. He doesn’t know enough to be outraged. Or scared. Another time, I’d have laughed openly at him, or slipped in beside him and forced him into an excruciating ten minutes of small talk with the object of his scorn. That Mickey Delaney’s long gone, it seems. 

This Mickey Delaney has more pressing things to do with her transit time. Like deciding whether I’m really going to pull the cord in four stoplights’, or let the Shoreline Café and the conversation with Steph roll on by. If I miss the stop, I can call from the apartment, apologize, claim weariness, be too damned drunk to discuss what we’re going to do about two more dead kids when there were supposed to be none at all. Maybe if I stall, the decision of what to do will fall right out of my hands. That sounds much better than I know it should.

Funny; I never used to consider myself a coward.

Three more lights. The cord bumps my knuckles as the bus stops for the red. I should do it. Just get it over with, and quit hiding from ghosts and dreams. So why am I not taking hold of the cord? 

A car pulls up next to the bus; low, square ended, the kind of thing they call ‘classic’ now, but they called ‘gas guzzler’ in the 80’s, and ‘POS land-yacht’ in the 90’s. Bowling alleys in front and back, pseudo leather over the top in a tired landscape of cracks and grit. And Steph in the passenger’s seat.

Her hair's straggling out of its scrunchie, her uniform shirt's spotted with coffee and ketchup, and her pointed little chin's set hard as an ice breaker's prow. And she’s riding shotgun in Detective Hayden’s Oldsmobile. 

“What are you doing?” I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until my breath fogs the glass. I scrub the haze away with my sleeve. “What the hell are you doing?”

She looks. Drawn by my movement, or the gravity of shock, she looks at the bus, gasps as she sees me. I don’t want to see hope there again, not that twist-in-the-gut utter faith, and shaky-with-relief kind of fire that blazes up in those eyes. Whatever she’s done, how can she think I’ll know how to sort it out?

Her lips move, as though I could read her meaning across the gulf between us. Then she flinches, schools her face back to ‘resolute’, and turns to say something to the driver. I can see two taped-up fingers hovering over the steering wheel, the wrist brace a hollow gleam disappearing into his jacket. She nods, then claws the scrunchie out of her hair, shaking lazy curls free. In the haunted blue light of the dash I half expect them to float weightless around her head, but they settle on her shoulders, and then she smiles. Almost.

_Stephanie Nayatt, what the hell are you up to?_

The light changes, and despite my willing it, the bus can't keep up with the Olds’ V8. They’re out of sight by the time we're at the Café, and I dial into my voicemail in the hope that my prickling thumbs and pounding heart are somehow wrong.

The first five messages are just what I expected. Questions, panicky anger, desperation that must have flown like a red flag above her head. She learnt things as well over the day, from the same bored cops who’d stopped to gossip on their way home. The out-of-towner kids, the eyes, the clothes. And she made no better use of them than I had, though as her messages progressed, the fear bled out of her voice, and a savage, crafty note came in. I could almost hear the plan take root as she talked into the empty space where I had not been.

The last message was the important one.

_Mickey, we have to go back. Tonight, when the tide will be low enough to show the gate. It’s the only way we’ll know what this means, you know it is. We have to go back where it really happened to be sure no one’s been there, or… we have to go see, or we’ll drive ourselves nuts._

A pause. A murmur from behind a muffling hand. A reply. Neither make any sense, then the line goes sharply clear again, and her voice is cold and cloudy as sea ice. 

_“I’m going home after this shift. If I haven’t heard from you by then, I’ll… I’ll find some other way to get out to Sentinel. But I need you to come, Mickey. You can’t make me face that place alone, I know you can’t. The paper said the eclipse starts at midnight, so come before then. We can get in and out before the light’s gone, and…_

A sound, equal kin to a gasp, hiccup and death rattle. Then, _"You have to come, Mickey. Please."_

And then there’s nothing more. The dead air is like a seashell to the ear, and I weather the urge to hurl the phone. The bus turns, and engine groaning at the strain, labors up Fenswych hill. I watch the Fortress Point harbor light as we climb, its beam winking as it sweeps the darkness.

On the other side of the bay, the moon perches bald faced and patient on the granite spars of Sentinel Cove. But as relentless as that cold glare seems now, the truth is even worse; there is only so long she will wait.

_Have you ever heard of a skeleton key, Michaela?_

Of course I have. One key is much the same as another, and any of them can open that sort of lock with a little time and patience. Unless someone else has put their own key into the lock from the other side, in which case the door stays closed fast for another year.

Or so the madman tried to tell me.

^*^

I make it out to the cove in just about two hours. Steph is waiting for me, perched on the Olds' trunk while the wind braids her hair with ragged streams of cigarette smoke. The ground at her feet is littered with spent butts. Far as I can tell, she's alone.

"Thought you weren't coming." Her voice is low, rough and thick, as though she's been crying. Or screaming.

I wave a hand at the moon mid-sky. "Nobody saw me," I tell her by way of explanation. The car's icy under my hip, but I'm exhausted, and my knee feels like it's fraying under my skin. The smoke slashes across my nose, and beneath the tobacco sear I can smell burning oil, oakum, and driftwood.

"Where's Hayden?"

She stares at me, the planes of her face gone sharp and alien in the moonlight, and for a moment I think she isn't going to answer. Then she's sliding across the trunk, cuddling close and draping herself like weed across my shoulder. "He went down already. Said he was going to check it out and make sure it was safe. You know how he is."

And I don't ask how he made the climb down those treacherous rock steps – not so smooth or level as in my dreams, not for centuries now, -- with his fingers taped and his wrist in a brace. I don't ask why her hair is damp as it whips across my neck, or why she smells of the salt spray that's pounding the rocks eighty-five feet below. I don't ask why I can't remember how I got her out of the cave and up the cliff with my crap knee. I don't ask why she never went home again.

And I don't ask her _‘What have you done?’_

Because I don't want to, don't need to. I can feel, for a second, a jutting bulk of steel between breast and hip as she pillows against me. Then she's slipping off the car, one of my hands caught in hers as she tows me across the tarmac to the ruined overlook point.

"Creepy," she says, climbing onto the burnt out platform so she can look out over the water. The wind lifts her hair in wild flows behind her, and I cannot see her eyes to tell whether it's a joke or not. But then I'm not exactly laughing because it's funny.

"I meant the wind." She gives me her best disarming smile. In this strange stormlight, it looks like a rictus. "Almost sounds like something's screaming."

I join her on the unburnt half of the deck, but don't bother pretending to watch the storm. "Singing," I tell her, and she laughs.

"Singing, huh? What sings like that? Cats in a blender?"

Should I tell her she isn't actually fooling me? "Mermaids." She giggles, but I press on. "Sirens, coming to air only when the moon's light can't blind them. Swum up by thousands from the deeps to sing hymns to the God of all Storms."

It takes a moment for her to manage that laugh again. "Okay. Mermaid carols. Why not? I like that better than wind over the chimney holes anyhow." Then she ducks under the charred crossbeam, slithers around a concrete piling and draws up on the worn rock that heads the descent. "We should get going before it starts to rain."

And yeah, I do have to follow. 

The climb's easier, but maybe that's because my brain's had a year of dream-practice to learn the way. The wind's just as fierce, but now I can spare the attention to listen properly, I can almost pick the melody line out of the chaos of wind and water.

The tide's fully out when I set my feet on the red stone path. I can hear it fretting some dozen or two yards beyond the guardian stone. The moonlight's is fading, her white face bruising up in creeping red shadow. Not quite enough light to check the gun that's tucked into my own waistband, so I'll have to do it by feel. Of Detective Hayden there is no sign. 

Stephanie turns on the path. "Mickey, what's wrong now? We don't have a lot of time here."

I search for her face in the bleeding light. "Have you ever heard of a skeleton key, Steph?" 

It feels like a test, and when she laughs at me and claps my shoulder to haul me along, I can't tell which of us passed it, and which of us failed. And then she lets me go, fumbling out a flashlight as the moon's last sliver is conquered, and the storm reaches out to devour the remains.

"You know I love you, Mickey Delaney," she says as the fierce, false light chases all trace of human warmth from her face, "But you've got too many ghosts. Sometimes I swear it seems like you never left this place at all." Then she turns away and slashes her way through the cave mouth's darkness, leaving me to follow with a dead man's gun burning cold in my hand. 

I cycle a bullet into the chamber, and count my potential shots from memory, saving out the very last bullet for me.

"I didn't leave," I say to the wind, the sea, and the dark-faced moon. "Not really."

^*^ Fin ^*^

**Author's Note:**

> This is another entry from **A Thing Of Rags and Patches**. It was written as an experiment in negative-space storytelling. Inspired, in part, by Caitlin Kiernan's narrative voice in _The Red Tree_. I wanted to see if I could write a horror story without showing anything particularly horrible happening. Readers' reactions on this have always been fun for me. First confusion, then some mental addition, and then the realization that no, they really DO know what happened, even though I never said it outright.
> 
> Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts, if you're inclined to take a moment and write a comment.


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